I thoroughly enjoyed some home cooking for the two nights while I was here but today, there was plenty of food to finish off for breakfast. I eat lots of food on tour, and breakfast is often my favourite meal, so I dug into eggs,toast, muesli, yoghurt and bananas and got ready to go.
What I don’t like doing is the washing up. When I’m camping, there’s not much to wash up. My saucepan is my bowl, so it’s just that and my cup, but here it was fry pans, bowls, glasses and cutlery for two days. There’s a lot to be said for simplicity.
It was fresh this morning but clear with no rain expected. The Eurovelo 1 route that I was going to follow for most of the day went about 300m past my door, so it was easy to navigate out of Galway. The weather was quite a change after the last few days.
It took nearly ten kilometres before I was clear of the fast Galway traffic. It was Saturday morning so I wonder what all the rush was. The Irish can be exasperatingly slow at times, it seems that when they’re behind the wheel they wake up and hurry.
It was another ten kilometres before I was on quiet roads where I stayed for the rest of the day. This was more like the Ireland I was expecting – rolling hills filled with verdant green fields separated by old stone drywalls that weren’t that dry. I was amazed by the amount of rock in the fields but as I neared the Burren National Park, I understood why. There were rock hills that looked like they’d been used for centuries with paths, walls and arranged rocks that suggested ancient times.
I climbed up the hill of the day and stopped at the viewpoint near the top. There was a polish photographer snapping hundreds of photos and he was keen to tell me about other places in the vicinity that I should visit. Each one seemed to be 10kms away and over a few hills. I told him that riding a bike isn’t as easy as jumping in your car to get there and he grudgingly agreed – “but they are beautiful and you’ll get some great photos, but yes, I guess …”
I could see why he was here. The day was clear and the light perfect.
I set off for what I thought was all downhill to Doolin but I shouldn’t have been so naive. Of course there were uphills and tiny lanes that meant stopping for cars and getting off the bike or leaning into hedges to let them pass. I went through Lisdoonvarna and then Doolin, a place I’d been to forty years ago. It now looks like an upmarket tourist destination. It used to be a sleepy seaside village. The pub, Gus O’Connor’s was still there and that’s where I had dinner. It was full of tourists due to he proximity to the Cliffs of Moher and ferries to the Aran Islands. It was a nice walk of a km and a half from where I was staying, to the pub.
I struck it lucky at the place I was staying. My single room turned out to be a two bedroom suite due to all of the other rooms being already taken. I had my choice of bedrooms and felt like Goldilocks in choosing the best bed.
